TRIGGERnometry - May 10, 2024


The Case for Electoral Reform - Andrew Doyle

Hosted by
Francis Foster Konstantin Kisin
Guests
Andrew Doyle
Mentioned
Beautiful Noise Hillary Clinton Sweet Caroline Rishi Sunak Nick Clegg Penny Mordaunt David Cameron John Brennan Donald Trump Grant Shapps E.M. Forrester Jeremy Hunt Tony Benn Lib Dem Churchill Sisyphus Starmer
Ex CIA Agent： Why Israel and Ukraine Can’t Win - Andrew Bustamante Israel⧸Palestine： Asking The Questions No One Else Will - Norman Finkelstein

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

169.58

Word count

1,577

Sentence count

87

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I discuss the dangers of our current system of one-party rule, and the need for proportional representation in order to achieve a truly representative democracy. I also discuss why the current system is not working, and why we need proportional representation.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.700 Broadway's smash hit, The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise, is coming to Toronto.
00:00:06.520 The true story of a kid from Brooklyn destined for something more, featuring all the songs you love,
00:00:11.780 including America, Forever in Blue Jeans, and Sweet Caroline.
00:00:15.780 Like Jersey Boys and Beautiful, the next musical mega hit is here, The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise.
00:00:22.660 April 28th through June 7th, 2026, The Princess of Wales Theatre.
00:00:27.120 Get tickets at Mirvish.com.
00:00:30.980 Broadway's smash hit, The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise, is coming to Toronto.
00:00:36.820 The true story of a kid from Brooklyn destined for something more, featuring all the songs you love,
00:00:42.080 including America, Forever in Blue Jeans, and Sweet Caroline.
00:00:46.080 Like Jersey Boys and Beautiful, the next musical mega hit is here, The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise.
00:00:52.820 April 28th through June 7th, 2026, The Princess of Wales Theatre.
00:00:57.900 Get tickets at Mirvish.com.
00:01:00.000 Pollsters are imperfect profits. We saw them humiliated in the 2016 US general election.
00:01:07.560 One survey by the Princeton Election Consortium declared that the chance of Hillary Clinton defeating Donald Trump was over 99%.
00:01:15.340 Here in the UK in the same year, very few believed that the majority would vote to leave the European Union, even among those who most desired that outcome.
00:01:23.280 The electorate is a fickle beast.
00:01:25.520 So what are we to make of the latest of many ominous polls for the Conservatives?
00:01:29.120 A recent YouGov analysis seemingly obliterates Rishi Sunak's chances of victory, with Labour projected to win over 400 seats.
00:01:37.200 If this prophecy plays out, it would see numerous cabinet ministers dispatched, including Jeremy Hunt, Penny Mordaunt and Grant Shapps.
00:01:44.680 The results are even worse for the Tories than those revealed by a poll commissioned by Conservative Britain Alliance in January, which drew information from a sample seven times larger than the norm.
00:01:55.080 We've seen pollsters get it disastrously wrong in the past, but surely the return of Labour is now in inevitability.
00:02:00.980 And although I'm unlikely to vote for either Sunak or Starmer, I would never be comfortable with any one party holding such an overwhelming majority.
00:02:09.240 Effective government requires effective opposition.
00:02:11.920 The dominance of the SNP in Scotland should by now have taught us all a lesson about the calamities of a one-party state.
00:02:19.560 So now might be an opportune moment to revisit the prospect of electoral reform.
00:02:23.780 A new system that might usher into Parliament a wider range of perspectives and keep the excesses of the government in check seems long overdue.
00:02:32.800 The first-past-the-post system guarantees that the two major parties are forever vying for ultimate control, but is this necessarily best for the country?
00:02:40.780 It certainly isn't democratic.
00:02:42.480 Take the general election of 2015.
00:02:44.560 Having garnered 3.9 million votes, UKIP were rewarded with just one seat in Parliament.
00:02:50.560 By contrast, the 1.5 million votes for the SNP resulted in 56 seats.
00:02:57.380 Under proportional representation, UKIP would have ended up with 83 members of Parliament.
00:03:03.140 Now, I was never a supporter of UKIP, but I was surprised by those who couldn't resist the temptation to revel in the sheer injustice of this result.
00:03:11.700 At the time, we heard many commentators resulting to a combination of kazooistry and self-deception
00:03:16.820 to claim that it was somehow in the interests of the demos to prevent its wishes from being realised.
00:03:22.320 Nothing much has changed over the years, with smaller parties often routinely belittled as irrelevant or populist.
00:03:28.600 In the case of UKIP, David Cameron famously referred to them as fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists.
00:03:35.540 The latter designation sounds very much like the kind of amateur telepathy one hears 0.70
00:03:39.760 from those who habitually accused their political opponents of dog-whistling.
00:03:44.320 Even if it were the case that the electorate was merely some kind of basket of deplorables,
00:03:48.600 to borrow Hillary Clinton's self-destructive utterance, 1.00
00:03:51.440 this would not warrant the high-handed dismissal of their wishes.
00:03:55.140 Democracy is by no means flawless, but it's surely better than the alternative.
00:04:00.000 One thinks of that phrase often attributed to Churchill,
00:04:02.940 democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.
00:04:06.440 The novelist E.M. Forster came to a similar conclusion when he wrote that
00:04:10.460 democracy is less hateful than other contemporary forms of government,
00:04:15.160 and to that extent, it deserves our support.
00:04:18.080 A benevolent tyrant can do wonders for society until his ego becomes inflated with overfeeding.
00:04:24.200 One thing is certain, the current system is not working.
00:04:27.360 A trust in government survey by the Office of National Statistics last year
00:04:30.720 revealed that Parliament and the political parties were the least trusted of all public institutions,
00:04:36.440 trusted by 24% and 12% of the population respectively.
00:04:41.120 This is the natural consequence of a rise of a technocratic approach to governance,
00:04:45.380 a preponderance of careerists rather than truly vocational members of Parliament,
00:04:49.760 and a paternalistic attitude from our representatives towards those who have put them in power.
00:04:55.000 These are combustible times, with many of us now joining that growing tribe of the politically homeless.
00:05:00.260 The failings of both our major parties are not going to be remedied by the electorate
00:05:04.840 lurching from one to the other, a kind of seesaw that swings according to desperation and fatigue.
00:05:11.340 Events of recent years have disclosed an unappealing truth.
00:05:15.100 Many of the political class no longer believe in democracy.
00:05:18.980 Consider what happened in the post-Brexit years,
00:05:21.200 when MPs on both sides of the House were brazenly attempting to subvert the result
00:05:25.680 of the largest mandate in political history.
00:05:28.880 The demos had voted the wrong way and had to be stopped.
00:05:32.860 Rather than reflect on why the public vote the way they do,
00:05:36.180 many politicians have instead sought to game the system and work around the wishes of the people.
00:05:41.840 Former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg wrote a book called How to Stop Brexit.
00:05:47.060 It may as well have been called How to Stop Democracy.
00:05:50.200 Political philosopher Jason Brennan was more explicit in his aims.
00:05:53.220 His book Against Democracy argued that voters were too fickle,
00:05:57.640 ill-informed and easily manipulated to be entrusted with major decisions.
00:06:02.040 He favoured an epistocracy, rule of the knowledgeable,
00:06:05.920 a notion reminiscent of Plato's ideal of the philosopher king.
00:06:10.180 Opponents of this view, by contrast, remind us that it is natural and healthy
00:06:14.480 for politicians to fear the might of the electorate.
00:06:18.160 The British socialist Tony Benn was fond of asking five key questions
00:06:22.660 regarding democracy.
00:06:24.520 What power have you got?
00:06:26.200 Where did you get it from?
00:06:27.860 In whose interests do you use it?
00:06:30.760 To whom are you accountable?
00:06:32.880 How do we get rid of you?
00:06:34.700 This final question strikes at the heart of what it means to live in a society free from tyranny.
00:06:40.460 In a democracy, those in political authority are servants of the people
00:06:44.260 and may be dispensed with at their collective whim.
00:06:46.960 Perhaps the future of British politics lies with the smaller parties
00:06:50.720 who might effectively elevate the voices of the demos
00:06:53.320 rather than strategise to see them stifled.
00:06:56.380 This will require a system of proportional representation
00:06:59.520 and it is not in the interests of either major party
00:07:02.720 to countenance such an eventuality.
00:07:05.480 A referendum on PR might have been a condition of a future coalition
00:07:09.120 between Labour and the Liberal Democrats
00:07:10.840 but these latest polls make this outcome highly unlikely.
00:07:15.340 The last serious attempt at electoral reform
00:07:18.060 was the referendum on the alternative vote, AV
00:07:20.960 which came about due to the Conservative and Lib Dem coalition government
00:07:24.820 that formed after the 2010 general election.
00:07:27.980 It seemed like a fudge,
00:07:29.600 a system of ranking candidates in order of preference
00:07:32.160 that occupied a kind of middle ground
00:07:34.620 between first-past-the-post and proportional representation.
00:07:37.980 Nick Clegg called it a miserable little compromise.
00:07:41.260 Explanatory leaflets from the Electoral Commission
00:07:43.280 made the AV system appear needlessly complicated.
00:07:47.040 Those who were keen for reform were being asked to settle for second best.
00:07:51.600 Little wonder that the voters weren't persuaded.
00:07:53.940 It has been said that our first-past-the-post system
00:07:56.060 protects us from the ineffectual and volatile nature of coalition governments
00:08:00.040 and one might point to Italy as a cautionary tale
00:08:03.060 but Germany, Finland and the Netherlands seem to make it work
00:08:07.160 and there is no reason to think it wouldn't be preferable
00:08:09.400 to the instability we've experienced under our two-party system.
00:08:13.820 I mean, could it really get any worse?
00:08:16.540 The Tories will rightly be drubbed in the next election,
00:08:19.420 most significantly by those who are fully aware
00:08:21.560 that a Labour government will ensure that the decline in trust continues.
00:08:25.920 Such is the strength of feeling
00:08:27.180 against the Conservative Party's betrayal of its principles
00:08:29.960 that its traditional supporters would rather see it punished
00:08:33.400 than prevent a Labour victory.
00:08:35.080 But all of this back and forth gets us nowhere.
00:08:38.160 We surely require a form of democracy that is workable for our times.
00:08:43.240 The dominance of these two parties is why electoral reform is so needed
00:08:46.960 but it is also why it is unlikely to materialise.
00:08:50.700 In other words, the nature of the problem works against its own solution.
00:08:55.320 These circumstances are far from ideal
00:08:57.100 but it looks as though we're going to be stuck
00:08:58.960 in this maddening cycle for the foreseeable future.
00:09:01.720 Like Sisyphus, we'll just have to keep on rolling that rock up the hill
00:09:05.800 until someone finds a way to break it apart.
00:09:09.520 If you enjoyed this video, please do check out my substack
00:09:12.440 where all of these articles appear weeks in advance.
00:09:15.280 There's plenty of other material there too,
00:09:17.120 so do check it out.